How to return to subjectivity? Natorp, Husserl, and Lacan on the limits of reflection

This article discusses the recent call within contemporary phenomenology to return to subjectivity in response to certain limitations of naturalistic explanations of the mind. The meaning and feasibility of this call is elaborated by connecting it to a classical issue within the phenomenological tradition concerning the possibility of investigating the first-person perspective through reflection. We will discuss how this methodological question is respectively treated and reconfigured in the works of Natorp, Husserl, and Lacan. Finally, we will lay out some possible consequences of such a cross-reading for the conception of subjectivity and the concomitant effort to account for this dimension of first-person experience in response and in addition to its omission within the standard third-person perspective of psychological research

Revisión de la tectónica activa de los Pirineos

The Pyrenees have experienced at least seven earthquakes with magnitude M > 5 in the last 400 years. During the last decades, several seismotectonic, neotectonic and paleoseismological studies have focused on identifying the main active structures of the areas experiencing damaging earthquakes. In spite of these studies, the regional stress regime is still discussed and there is no unequivocal seismotectonic model at the scale of the range. In this paper, we first present a revision of the former works on active faults in the Pyrenees, and then we discuss the main results in terms of their neotectonic setting. We have distinguished five neotectonic regions according to their seismicity, faulting style and morphologic evolution: the westernmost Pyrenees, the North Western Pyrenean zone, the Foreland basins, the Lower Thrust Sheets Domain and the Eastern Pyrenees. This review lead us to differentiate the range into two major domains: the High Chain, where active faults are controlled by vertical maximum stresses, and the Low Chain, where horizontal maximum stresses of variable orientation seem to be dominant. We propose that these different stress domains are related to the isostatic rebound in response to either the difference in crustal thickness and/or the distribution of the Plio-Quaternary erosion.En los últimos 400 años, los Pirineos han sufrido al menos siete terremotos de magnitud M > 5. Durante las últimas décadas, varios estudios de sismotectónica, neotectónica y paleosismología han tratado de identificar las principales estructuras activas en las zonas epicentrales de los terremotos destructivos. A pesar de estos estudios, el estado de esfuerzos sigue bajo debate, sin que haya un modelo sismotectónico unívoco a la escala de la cordillera. En este artículo, realizamos una revisión de los trabajos previos sobre fallas activas en los Pirineos, y comentamos los principales resultados en términos de su contexto neotectónico. Hemos distinguido cinco regiones neotectónicas de acuerdo con su evolución geomorfológica, su sismicidad y el estilo de sus fallas: los Pirineos más occidentales, la Zona Noroeste Pirenaica, las cuencas de antepais, el dominio de láminas cabalgantes inferiores y los Pirineos Orientales. Esta revisión nos ha llevado a diferenciar la cadena en dos dominios principales: la Alta Cadena, donde estructuras paralelas a la cordillera son reactivadas como fallas normales y la Baja Cadena, donde las fallas han sido reactivadas por esfuerzos máximos compresivos subhorizontales y de orientación variable. En este trabajo proponemos que las diferencias en los esfuerzos de estos dominios guardan relación con el reajuste isostático en respuesta a diferencias en el espesor de la corteza y/o la distribución de la erosión Plio-cuaternaria

Love, artificiality and mass identification

How are we to understand the phenomenon of mass identification, epitomized in recent exhibitions of national feeling such as that of South Africa’s 2010 Football World Cup celebrations? Rather than focussing on the concepts of discourse and nationalism, or advancing an analysis of empirical data, this paper outlines a conceptual response to the challenge at hand, drawing on the tools of psychoanalytic theory. Three explanatory perspectives come to the fore. Firstly, such exhibitions of mass emotion might be understood as demonstrations of love, as examples of the libidinal ties that constitute and consolidate mass identification. Secondly, the marked artificiality of such displays of emotion and the fact of the ‘externality’ they entail might be seen, paradoxically, to be essential rather than inauthentic or secondary features of the displays in question. Thirdly, we might advance, via Lacan, that many of our most powerful emotions require not only recourse to the field of the inter-subjective, but reference also to the anonymous, ‘fictional’ framework of available symbolic forms

The relational ethics of conflict and identity

The contemporary psychoanalytically inflected vocabulary of relational ethics centres on acknowledgement, witnessing and responsibility. It has become an important code for efforts to connect with otherness across fractures of hurt, oppression and suffering. One can see the deployment of this vocabulary to challenge patterns of exclusion and dehumanisation in zones of intense political conflict in many situations in which destructive hatred reigns. This paper traces some of the use of and disputes over this ‘acknowledgement-based’ relational ethics in the recent work of Jessica Benjamin and Judith Butler. The field of application is their response to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, given their position as Jews. The challenge of the acknowledgement agenda leads back to an issue of general concern – the degree to which relational ethics can prise open apparently closed and defensive psychosocial identities

The Irredeemable Debt: On the English Translation of Lacan's First Two Public Seminars

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in Psychoanalysis and History . The Version of Record is available online at: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/pah.2017.0214Drawing on archival sources and personal recollections, this essay reconstructs the troubled history of the first robust attempt at making the works of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan newly available to an anglophone readership, after his death in 1981. It details how the project was initiated by John Forrester as part of a large-scale initiative to generate translations of both Lacan’s own texts and seminars, and various books written in the Lacanian tradition. If, almost seven years after it was conceived, Forrester’s project only resulted in the publication of English translations of Lacan’s first two public seminars, the essay demonstrates that this was not owing to disagreements over the quality of Forrester’s work, but because of two consecutive sources of resistance. External resistance from publishers first led to the initial project being reduced to the translation of two seminars, whereas internal resistance from Lacan’s son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller to Forrester’s vision of presenting the seminars with a full scholarly apparatus subsequently brought about delays in its execution

Entrepreneurship, incongruence and affect: drawing insights from a Swedish anti-racist organisation

In recent years, entrepreneurship has been reconceptualised as social change. Understood as such, entrepreneurship can be viewed to disrupt and disturb the social order. We argue in this paper that Foucault’s notion of heterotopia and Lacan’s concepts of the real and anxiety help us to conceptualize the disturbing aspect of entrepreneurship as social change, and understand why the latter may encounter social resistance. Our contribution to critical entrepreneurship literature is to first emphasise that entrepreneurship instigates social change by introducing incongruence, and second, to highlight that this process can be affective: it can create anxiety. The paper uses an illustrative historical case-example of a Swedish anti-racist commercial magazine (Gringo) to elucidate these points. We conclude by pointing out that anxiety may be necessary for the provocation of social transformation